How to annotate during a presentation or video call
Talking people through a screen is mostly a pointing problem. "The third row, on the right" takes a sentence and still misses; a circle around it takes half a second and does not. Drawing on the screen while you present turns your voice and the picture into the same instruction.
Set up before you start
Two settings are worth choosing before anyone is watching, because changing them mid-sentence is exactly the distraction you are trying to avoid:
- Fade delay. On a live call, marks that clear themselves after ten or fifteen seconds keep the screen from silting up. Set it to off only when you intend to build a diagram up in layers.
- Toolbar position. Drag the toolbar to an edge that your slides do not use. It floats above everything, so wherever you leave it is where it stays.
Then learn one key: Ctrl + Shift + D turns drawing on and off from anywhere, without clicking on GlassNib first. During a call that shortcut does most of the work.
Share the whole screen, not a single window
An overlay is its own window sitting above the others. If your conferencing software is sharing one specific window, it may capture only that window and not the layer drawn on top of it. Sharing the entire screen or display avoids the question entirely, and is what you want in any case if you are going to move between applications while you talk.
It is worth checking once, before a real call, with whichever tool your team uses — a ten-second test share tells you more than any general rule.
What to reach for while you talk
Slides and dashboards reward a small set of moves, and most presenters only ever need these:
- Arrow for "this one" — it has a direction, so it survives being glanced at.
- Highlighter over a line of text or a table row: thick translucent ink that covers without hiding.
- Ellipse to group several things that belong together.
- Cardinal axis when several things radiate from one point — two perpendicular lines through a single centre, and every axis after the first starts from that same centre.
When the slide is not enough
Sometimes the answer to a question is not on any slide. The board covers the screen with a plain white or black surface, which gives you somewhere to explain from scratch without leaving the call to open another application. Worksheets do the same job across a longer session: open as many as you like, name them, and move between them without losing a stroke — so the diagram you drew in the first ten minutes is still there when someone asks about it at the end.
Afterwards
Ctrl + Shift + S captures the screen with the annotations on it. Sending that image after a call is usually faster, and clearer, than writing the same explanation out again.